And that hip-to-hip bump in the video sure looks awfully suggestive to me … unless the Bible says that’s OK, better prohibit that, too….and how about the shoulder rub that Bush laid on a female Head of State??? naughty naughty…..(actually, that really was reprehensible behavior that showed a total lack of respect)

It looked like something camp counselors would do at the end of camp as a joke. They probably did want to encourage people do give side hugs (weird…) but in the funniest way they could. I sure hope the format was a joke.

now i think of it, that *is* the sort of hug you get from fundie men. (the side hug, i mean.) i guess i always took it as some weird christian lemming/clone-chic sort of a thing to do. never really considered that there was a ‘religious’ reason for it. oh. it always felt deeply patronising. like the sort of shoulder squeeze you’d give to a kid on the baseball team you coach. oh. now i feel dirty.

My guess is that it is self-parody: “We Christians sometimes do things like restricting ourselves to the side-hug in order to prevent even the appearance of eroticism, and this is a bit silly and going too far, though of course the impulse to self-control is respectable in general, so certainly no one ought to be condemned for side-hugging.”

You have to remember that within fundie Christianity there is a hierarchy of permissiveness in which everyone below you is sinful and everyone above you is a Pharisee. (Eg., one group might say that women can wear jeans and it’s ok to listen to soft rock, but midriff baring is out as is rap music… Another group might condone the drinking of alcohol in limited circumstances while others are teetotalers, etc.) Given the use of the rap format for the song, one can presume that this group is on the more permissive side of the spectrum, which makes the song a parody.